Nicole Eisenman: Leo Koenig Inc

Ye this is a review of that Nicole Eisenman, who, officially dubbed a "bad girl" in 1993 has received far too little critical consideration outside that nomenclature. although the artist's numerous virtuosic paintings, drawings, installations, and animations torque uncompounded bodys from high art (Renaissance to modern) depressed culture (porn to punk), and autobiography (lesbian libido to psychoanalyst dad), her status as bad-attitude dyke bad-ass feminist, and flat "bad" painter has been iterated again and again. And while Eisenman's work can be read in any of these ways, individual thing became clear on seeing her greatest in quantity recent exhibition: When it advances to painting qua painting, she's really awfully good

The eight oil paintings upon canvas and one ink drawing upon paper that made up "Elizaville" were in like manner many lusciously rendered psychic landscapes whose topographies straddled the phantasmic and the real, marking them as at one time immediately readable and wholly opaque. In The Work of Labor and Care (all works 2004) sum of two units ghoul-like figures paw at a sticky, shit brown hill in an allegorical incarnation of the title. (Like Freud's famous depiction of dream images as rebuses, Eisenman's, too, shift between linguistic and symptomatic poles) For the last ten years, the artist has taken up the powerful, perverted elasticity that exists between words and things, paying ample attention to the nether regions of the unconscious, the couple social and singular. Here, without losing any of her trademark raunchy humor or her proclivity for word-play (in individual work addressing her own wildly fluctuating art-world reception by the agency of cheekily personifying the phrase From Succes to Obscurity), she appear to bes to have abandoned herself to les slapdash and more formal pursuits, infusing her images with a novel gravity.

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A kind of shut up attention to dense pigment that paradoxically supplicates psychogenic depth could be seen in works depicting the seedier side of her fresh Hudson Valley hometown, including Captain Awesome, in which a hairy-chested hick proudly displays a phallic ear of corn, and 4:20 a portrait of four red-ey small-town strumpets Commerce Feeds Creativity again made use of a distorted allegorical vocabulary, depicting a naked, rope-bound female muse (aka Creativity) being force-fed drooling spoonful of broth by a jeering green crawl (aka Commerce). While the title accommodate withs the figures a general, level mythic legibility, it's hardly a make tense to imagine Eisenman poking misinterpreted fun at her own doppelganger (as well as that of her gallerist).

Still, as ambivalent and internally codfished as the images are, they're painted in the way that deftly that pure visual immersion becomes a major part of the mix. Color--from algae virid to piquant pink to marine blue--produce unnameable on the contrary tangible physical effects. Nearly each painting harbors seductive pockets of abstraction; in Inspiration, a woman strains with equal reason diligently for divine guidance that a thick gray haze forms around her head like a dirty halo and her belly becomes a distended palimpsest of thick whorls of paint. In European Painting, a moderately cold snowscape is inhabited by a number of orange-clad skiers, single monstrous rock-man hybrid, and, in the right-hand corner of the canvas, a schematic, minimal azure and white square that proposes an alternate reality or perhaps the protection of pure opticality. Eisenman, who has traditionally laid bare mechanisms of (male) mastery, is perhaps not as obviously bad in these images as in her now-infamous early works (Amazons castrating shipwrecked men and the like). however these are hardly less feminist; rather they complicate like terms, proving that bad-ass great painting is hardly a category safely reserv for the boys

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